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Ten Years After the Biscuit Fire: Evaluating Vegetation Succession and Post- Fire Management Effects

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Ten Years After the Biscuit Fire: Evaluating Vegetation Succession and Post- Fire Management Effects Project Title: Ten years after the Biscuit Fire: Evaluating vegetation succession and post- fire management effects Final Report: JFSP 11-1-1-4 Date of Final Report: 29 June 2015 Principle Investigator: Dr. Daniel C. Donato Washington State Department of Natural Resources 1111 Washington St SE, Box 47014 Olympia, WA 98504-7014 and University of Washington School of Environmental & Forest Sciences Seattle, WA 98195 360-902-1753 [email protected] Co-Principle Investigators: Dr. John L. Campbell Oregon State University Department of Forest Ecosystems & Society 321 Richardson Hall Corvallis, OR 97331 [email protected] Dr. Joseph B. Fontaine Murdoch University School of Veterinary and Life Sciences 90 South St. Perth, WA 6150, Australia [email protected] This research was supported in part by the Joint Fire Sciences Program. For further information go to www.firescience.gov Abstract Increases in the area of high-severity wildfire in the western U.S. have prompted widespread management concerns about post-fire forest succession and fuels. Key questions include the degree to which, and over what time frame: a) forests will regenerate back toward mature forest cover, and b) fire hazard increases due to the falling and decay of fire-killed trees, with and without post-fire (or ‘salvage’) logging. While a number of recent studies have begun to address these questions using chronosequences and model projections, we had the unique opportunity to track regeneration and fuel dynamics over a decade of post-fire succession by re-visiting our network of sample plots distributed in the 2002 Biscuit Fire in southwest Oregon. The ten-year benchmark for this iconic ‘mega-fire’ presented excellent learning opportunities, spanning gradients of forest type, fire combinations (single and reburn fires), and post-fire management intensity. We addressed questions on the following topics: 1) Rates and patterns of natural succession in a large mixed-severity landscape fire . Re- sprouted hardwoods and shrubs currently dominate the early-seral landscape, but conifer establishment has continued during the first post-fire decade, with increasing densities in most sample sites (71%) and patch-scale medians now averaging 2444 trees ha -1. Survival of early conifer cohorts to the 10-year point has been ~69%. The mixed-severity mosaic is still a key determinant of successional trajectories: within 400 m of live-tree edges, tree densities exceed 1000 trees ha -1 and occupancy is 80-90%; whereas beyond that distance, densities and occupancy decline rapidly. The interiors of large patches have less representation of Douglas-fir (otherwise the most abundant conifer in the area) and greater dominance by knobcone pine (which has in situ seed sources via serotinous cones) and resprouted hardwoods/shrubs. Changes in conifer density and height (i.e., growth) had little relation to hardwood/shrub abundance or stature at 10 years post-fire, suggesting that competitive interactions have yet to exert a major influence. 2) Decadal dynamics of live and dead fuels with and without post-fire logging. Regarding surface woody fuels, which started from large treatment differences immediately following logging (stepwise increases with harvest intensity), we found converging trends among treatments at 10 years, with convergence nearly complete for fine fuels but not for coarse fuels. Fire-killed snag biomass of Douglas-fir decayed while standing at a statistically significant rate (single-exponential k=0.011), similar to or only slightly slower than down wood, suggesting that not all snag biomass will reach the forest floor. Live vegetation in this productive system (with abundant re-sprouting sclerophyllous vegetation) is beginning to dominate surface fuel mass and continuity (>100% cover) and likely moderates differences associated with woody fuels. Post-fire logging had little effect on live fuels or their change over time, suggesting high potential for stand-replacing early-seral fire regardless of post-fire harvest treatments. 3) Effects of a reburn with and without prior post-fire logging . Dead wood mass following an early-seral reburn (15-year interval) was 169 Mg ha-1, approximately half that after a single long-interval fire (309 Mg ha -1). The difference was due to greater time for decay and combustion in a second fire. Charring (black C creation) was also higher in the reburn by a factor of 2 for logs and 8 for snags. Notwithstanding future disturbances, projections suggest the near-halving of dead wood in reburn stands will persist for ~50 years, and then attenuate by 100-150 years, illustrating the importance of stochastic variations in disturbance interval for long-term dead wood dynamics. Unmanaged reburn sites had very similar conifer regeneration densities and hardwood/shrub biomass to single-burn sites, whereas reburn sites that had been logged after the first fire were characterized by a shift toward much greater dominance by hardwoods and shrubs after a repeat fire – particularly Ceanothus species. Background and purpose This final report describes results from the project, “Ten years after the Biscuit Fire: Evaluating vegetation succession and post-fire management effects” (Project number 11-1-1-4), which was funded under Task Statement 1 of FA-RFA-11-1, Re-measurement Opportunities. The task statement solicited proposals to “re-measure existing field studies to assess the effects of high- severity fire on vegetation succession, and/or evaluate the effects of post-wildfire management.” The management of forests following stand-replacing wildfire lies at the nexus of many pressing environmental and societal concerns including the maintenance of biodiversity, local economic viability, ecosystem services, and the response of forests to climate change. Large-scale severe fires are expected to become increasingly common throughout much of North America, necessitating scientific data to inform post-fire management options and outcomes. To date, studies of post-fire vegetation and management have been largely limited to the few years immediately following fire or, if longer-term in scope, based on retrospective, prospective, or chronosequence inference. These approaches have been valuable, but necessarily either lack foundational short-term data, confound space and time, or project assumptions that are not fully validated. Thus there is a need for studies that track post-fire succession at the same locales through time. The 2002 Biscuit Fire has been called the most educational fire this side of Yellowstone (see, e.g., Turner et al. 2003). As the largest forest fire in Oregon’s recorded history, the Biscuit became a national focal point for key issues relating to post-fire management—uncertain forest regeneration, fuel succession, and a relatively large post-fire (‘salvage’) logging plan (USDA 2004). Many concerns were based on notorious reforestation difficulties in the region. The Biscuit Fire proved to be an unparalleled learning platform on these issues, in part because portions of it burned over the 1987 Silver Fire, itself partly salvaged in 1988. This sequence of disturbances and management actions provided an excellent factorial combination of stands burned once, burned twice, and both of these with and without post-fire management (Figs. 1- 2). Early post-fire data from the Biscuit Fire yielded several surprises, influencing the way large severe fires are perceived and managed. These surprises included unexpectedly robust forest regeneration (Donato et al. 2006a, 2009a; Halofsky and Hibbs 2009), counterintuitive (increasing) effects of post-fire logging and planting on re-burn potentials (Thompson et al. 2007, 2010; Donato et al. 2006a), and abundant and diverse wildlife and vegetation communities following a re-burn (Fontaine et al. 2009, Donato et al. 2009b). These important results prompted a synthesis paper of early Biscuit findings by a large interdisciplinary team of federal and university scientists (Halofsky et al. 2011). While it was important, informative, and largely unprecedented to capture the initial effects of this combination of disturbances, many have wondered whether these documented effects were ephemeral, or instead represent the beginning of unique successional trajectories affecting forest processes for decades or centuries. Only through continued re-measurement campaigns can we shed light on this question. From 2004-2006, we conducted field studies of vegetation and fuels in high-severity (>90% aboveground mortality) portions of the Biscuit Fire (Campbell et al. 2007; Donato et al. 2006a,b; Donato 2008; Donato et al. 2009a,b,c; Donato et al. 2013; Fontaine 2007; Fontaine et al. 2009; Fontaine et al. 2010; Law et al. 2004). These studies account for the majority of peer-reviewed scientific papers from the Biscuit Fire to date. One of our earliest publications reported some key surprises and generated especially high interest and scientific discussion (Donato et al. 2006a,b). These conclusions were later supported by multiple studies from other researchers (Shatford et al. 2007; Thompson et al. 2007; Halofsky and Hibbs 2009) as well as our own further publications (Donato et al. 2009a,b; 2013). Re-measurement of our sample allowed an evaluation of how those earlier findings have played out over the first post-fire decade. Our objectives were to: 1) Quantify rates and patterns of natural post-fire succession by environmental setting . We previously reported surprisingly robust conifer regeneration in this
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